Regular expression to match characters at beginning of line only [closed]

Question

I am trying to work on regular expressions. I have a mainframe file which has several fields. I have a flat file parser which distinguishes several types of records based on the first three letters of every line. How do I write a regular expression where the first three letters are 'CTR'.

Answer 1

Beginning of line or beginning of string?

Start and end of string

/^CTR.*$/ 

/ = delimiter
^ = start of string
CTR = literal CTR
$ = end of string
.* = zero or more of any character except newline

Start and end of line

/^CTR.*$/m 

/ = delimiter
^ = start of line
CTR = literal CTR
$ = end of line
.* = zero or more of any character except newline
m = enables multi-line mode, this sets regex to treat every line as a string, so ^ and $ will match start and end of line

While in multi-line mode you can still match the start and end of the string with \A\Z permanent anchors

/\ACTR.*\Z/m 

\A = means start of string
CTR = literal CTR
.* = zero or more of any character except newline
\Z = end of string
m = enables multi-line mode

As such, another way to match the start of the line would be like this:

/(\A|\r|\n|\r\n)CTR.*/ 

or

/(^|\r|\n|\r\n)CTR.*/ 

\r = carriage return / old Mac OS newline
\n = line-feed / Unix/Mac OS X newline
\r\n = windows newline

Note, if you are going to use the backslash \ in some program string that supports escaping, like the php double quotation marks "" then you need to escape them first

so to run \r\nCTR.* you would use it as "\\r\\nCTR.*"